Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Charlottesville

Trump has built his Presidency by catering to the interests and prejudices of his core base, rather than by trying to expand his field
of supporters.

Photograph by Evan Vucci / AP

On Monday morning, President Trump finally got around to reciting a few
appropriate sentences about the lethal violence that white supremacists
had unleashed over the weekend at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Racism is evil,” the President announced. The guilty will be
prosecuted. Heather Heyer, who was struck when a car drove into a crowd
of counter-demonstrators, did not deserve to die.

But the public will not soon forget Trump’s first utterance after the
events of Saturday. The violence, he said, had come from “many sides.”
In fact, the violence had been instigated not by many sides but by one:
the extremist right, whose followers apparently include the
twenty-year-old man charged with killing Heyer in an attack that injured nineteen
others. A number of prominent Republicans spoke of the events in less
equivocal terms; Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, was among those who called
the killing an act “of domestic terrorism.”

As the nation waited through the weekend for a further response from
Trump, he found time, first, to attack Kenneth C. Frazier, the chief
executive of Merck. Frazier, who is African-American, had just resigned
from the President’s American Manufacturing Council, because, he said in
a statement, “America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by
clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy.”
In response, Trump tweeted that Frazier would now “have more time to
LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!” (By the end of the day, Kevin Plank and Brian
Krzanich, the C.E.O.s of Under Armour and Intel, respectively, had also
quit the council.)

Trump’s emotions are unusually transparent, but, as he spoke on Monday
morning, from the White House, he sounded like a hostage forced to read
a message in a ransom video. This is hardly the first time that he has
been hesitant to distance himself from right-wing extremists. During the
campaign, for example, when David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the
Ku Klux Klan, endorsed him, he did not immediately repudiate Duke’s
support. Eventually, following a barrage of criticism similar to the one that he
received this past weekend, Trump issued a mild disavowal.

The origins of Trump’s support on the far right are examined in Joshua
Green’s indispensable new book, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald
Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” which illustrates how a
failed business venture led to an insight that undergirded Trump’s
Presidential bid. In 2005, Green writes, Bannon moved from Hollywood,
where he was a modestly successful producer, to Hong Kong, where he
proposed to capitalize on the popularity of the online video game World
of Warcraft, which had ten million subscribers. In the game, players
competed for virtual weapons, armor, and gold. Bannon hoped to profit
from an arrangement that allowed players to pay real money to attain
these virtual trophies—an idea that quickly collapsed.

In the process, however, Bannon discovered a universe of young men who
spent their days in imaginary worlds behind their computer screens. They
were literate, at least moderately well off, and manifestly alienated
from the world around them. As Green recounts, Bannon saw that they
represented a group that could be turned into a movement. “These guys,
these rootless white males, had monster power,” Bannon told Green. Then,
shortly after he returned from Hong Kong, Bannon took over the late
Andrew Breitbart’s right-wing Web site. As Green writes, Bannon
“envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so
powerful in the online world, and the right wing outsiders drawn to
Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude.” Breitbart News
appealed to certain disaffected young men by building on their
resentments—of African-Americans, of women, of Jews—and became, as
Bannon proudly noted, the “platform of the alt-right.” More to the
point, Breitbart also became an enthusiastic supporter of the Trump
campaign and, later, the Trump Presidency.

Just as it was easy for Bannon to draw a line from the young males of
the online-game world to the young males of the alt-right, it’s
similarly straightforward to draw a line from the alt-right to the
protesters in Charlottesville. Such people do not comprise the bulk of
the President’s base, but they are a dedicated part of it, and he has
shown great solicitude for their views. As if to demonstrate that fact,
on Sunday, Trump told Fox News that he might pardon Joe Arpaio, the
former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was recently convicted
of criminal contempt, and who has long been suspected of federal
civil-rights violations.

Trump has built his Presidency by catering to the interests and
prejudices of his core base, rather than by trying to expand his field
of supporters. His initial reaction to the tragedy in Charlottesville,
not his latter-day semi-recantation, is a case in point. It remains to
be seen whether this strategy will bring him success, or reëlection, but
it is the path he has chosen.

On Monday morning, President Trump finally got around to reciting a few
appropriate sentences about the lethal violence that white supremacists
had unleashed over the weekend at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Racism is evil,” the President announced. The guilty will be
prosecuted. Heather Heyer, who was struck when a car drove into a crowd
of counter-demonstrators, did not deserve to die.